Allen Frances Quotes

#1. Loose diagnosis is causing a national drug overdose of medication. Six percent of our people are addicted to prescription drugs, and there are now more emergency room visits and deaths due to legal prescription drugs than to illegal street drugs.6

Allen Frances

#2. Psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests.

Allen Frances

#3. Mental disorders don't really live 'out there' waiting to be explained. They are constructs we have made up - and often not very compelling ones.

Allen Frances

#4. There's a societal push for conformity in all rways," he said. "There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction.

Allen Frances

#5. There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.

Allen Frances

#6. The great unspoken paradox of the arduous process of psychoanalysis is that the best patients are the ones who never really needed it in the first place. Abnormal

Allen Frances

#7. Retrospective epidemiological studies report that 20% of the general population qualifies for a current psychiatric diagnosis and 50% for a lifetime one.4 Prospective epidemiological studies double these rates and suggest that mental disorder is becoming virtually ubiquitous.5, 6 During the past

Allen Frances

#8. DSM definitions do not include personal and contextual factors such as whether the depressive symptoms are an understandable response to loss, a terrible life situation, psychological conflict or personality factors.

Allen Frances